The “Beats off” Chronicles day eighty-nine: The old favourites deny that anything of the sort happened.

📣 We're hiring a Professor of Physical Geography 📣 We’re looking for an outstanding physical geographer or environmental scientist who combines scholarly distinction with a collaborative, creative and ambitious approach. Closing date: 22/09/2026 Apply now: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSM837/p...

Professor of Physical Geography at Loughborough University

Looking for a new job opportunity in academia? Check out this job opening for a Professor of Physical Geography on jobs.ac.uk!

jobs.ac.uk

The Dominican American historian, activist and prison abolitionist Dr. Johanna Fernández died on July 30 at the age of 55.

Johanna Fernández Dies at 55: Leading Scholar on the Young Lords & Latinx Freedom Movement

We look at the life and legacy of Dominican American historian, activist and prison abolitionist Dr. Johanna Fernández, who died on July 30 after a long battle with cancer. She was 55 years old. As a ...

democracynow.org

Claude AI shared chats have been reportedly exposed in Google Search results If you want to protect yourself (as much as possible) from risks like these, read our guide 👉 privacyinternational.org/guide-step/5...

Claude: Settings and good practices

AI chatbots are used by people in a variety of ways, including to conduct research, create content and analyses, deliver projects, and engage in conversations. We are concerned these AI tools can…

privacyinternational.org

The High Court also heard RTC leader Ben Cullen had threatened physical violence to a resident removing flags, boasting that he was a “violent criminal” who had served 15 years in prison. Full report in today’s Clarion: oxfordclarion.uk/the-clarion-...

The Clarion, 4 August 2026

We're doing a rain dance. You? While we wait for some sorely needed water, here is some news, not all of it cheerful. Including less than savoury details about Raise the Colours; celebrating Oxford Ci...

oxfordclarion.uk

One highways manager told the High Court she had been placed on medication after becoming “fearful of being followed home, tracked and exposed on social media”. Highways staff now wear unbranded PPE, work in unbranded vehicles, wear face coverings to hide their identity, and do not travel alone.

Leaders of flag-raising group Raise the Colours Oxfordshire placed trackers on highway workers’ cars to find out their home addresses, the High Court has heard. RTC then attempted to intimidate the highway staff into no longer removing flags by repeating their addresses to them.

Fascists are organised. Get fucking organised too.

Oxford Clarion@oxfordclarion.bsky.social · yesterday

Leaders of flag-raising group Raise the Colours Oxfordshire placed trackers on highway workers’ cars to find out their home addresses, the High Court has heard. RTC then attempted to intimidate the highway staff into no longer removing flags by repeating their addresses to them.

"Liberal bubble" has only ever meant anywhere where right wing perspectives aren't artificially elevated and forced into everyone's feeds.

I just can't stress enough that this isn't a real thing. What it actually means is *the absence* of some mechanism that artificially normalizes right-wing thought to give it *the appearance* of being on an even footing with what actual normal people think and talk about.

Reminder that the Tories believe any non-British person who commits more than a minor parking or traffic offence should be automatically deported. They “believe in second chances”, apparently, but only for literal Nazis.

Kemi Badenoch defends selection of man jailed for harassing Jewish MP in council election – as it happened

Conservative leader tells press she stands by decision to select Joshua Bonehill-Paine as a candidate for local election in Somerset

theguardian.com

Climate scientists speak out on Gatwick expansion: "No speech, no clever phrasing, and no appeal to future innovation can disguise the fact: by backing aviation expansion, the Transport Minister, the Chancellor, and the Prime Minister are betraying the very climate commitments they claim to uphold"

My July #WCCWiki project (only just finished) was a page for Mary Clara Dawes, the first woman in the UK to get an MA, and a classicist with particular enthusiasm for teaching ancient languages as 'living' language! Before her time! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Cl...

Mary Clara Dawes - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

“After years of monitoring how I walked, how my hands moved, how I stood, strength training taught me how to accept the body I have as mine.”

How accessing strength sports taught me to accept my trans body

"As part of my transition, I wanted to get buff, with a muscle bear physique. It's by no means a universal trans-masc thing, but it was mine."

wearequeeraf.com

BP's quarterly profits more than doubled to £4.2 billion in the three months to the end of June. These are the profits of war and climate chaos. It's time to make the biggest polluters pay.

If you are a Unite member and want more climate action (not less), look out for the ballot paper which should arrive in the next couple of days. Sharon Graham has argued for more drilling in the North Sea and briefed against Ed Miliband because of his work on net zero. Time to dump Sharon!

Revealed: Reform’s £24 Million from Fossil Fuel Interests Nigel Farage’s anti-climate party has received two thirds of its income from oil investors. www.desmog.com/2026/04/30/r... Crossposted with @openvibe.social

Revealed: Reform’s £24 Million from Fossil Fuel Interests - DeSmog

Reform UK has received £24 million from oil and gas interests, accounting for more than two thirds of its total income, DeSmog can reveal. Led by Nigel Farage, the party is calling for new North Sea oil and gas drilling ahead of UK-wide elections in May on the ill-founded claim that it will cut energy bills. […]

desmog.com

Anyone who votes for this disgraceful initiative should be on a watch list.

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 2d ago

An initiative on the ballot in Washington state in November would require all athletes seeking to play girl's sports from kindergarten to high school to undergo "genetic screening, a testosterone-levels test, or an examination of their reproductive anatomy" before they can play

"Measuring the health of local news has become far more complicated than simply counting newspapers."

A community can have local newspapers and still lack local news - Poynter

California’s local news landscape — from a thriving weekly in Carmel to a one-reporter newsroom in Merced — shows why counting newspapers isn't enough

poynter.org

“The ICE agents that attacked me followed me by transport in one of their unmarked vehicles to the hospital, and then came into my room with me in a trauma unit while I was trying to be treated."

“The ICE agent behind me grabbed the back of my shirt and just threw me like a sack of trash”

People keep suing the agency for beating them up.

motherjones.com

This is my little bit of the Green Gathering festival in Chepstow. The Radical Family Space, in Campaigns, whose mission is to gently indoctrinate children with a full programme of proudly woke workshops and storytelling. 😎🩷🌱✊

Super moon, Green Gathering, Chepstow, Wales

What does this summer of fire and ash mean for people raising the next generation? How can we look to the future with hope and confidence? I wrote this over the weekend for parents struggling to stay positive in the teeth of climate breakdown medium.com/the-new-clim...

A Summer of Violence

The debt is now here for us all. We knew it would come.

medium.com

This is also of course how the AI data centers are being used. The ones that are sucking dry our water and burning up the planet. A lot of which is justified on the basis of economic and pro-social advances.

Matt Burgess (WIRED)@mattburgess1.bsky.social · last wk.

NEW: A glimpse at how AI image generators are used. Researchers set up a fake image editor on Hugging Face and within a week received 1,000 prompts. 73% of them were sexual and 83% of those were asking for people (women) to be “undressed”. Around 6% of the sexual requests also targeted minors

If you missed last night‘s BBC, Front Row, do listen to Graeme Garden talking about the rebel genius that was Bill Oddie. Link below…

Samira Ahmed@samiraahmeduk.bsky.social · last wk.

Graeme Garden is going to talk about his friend Bill Oddie on tonight's BBC Front Row.

Quite.

Tanita Tikaram@tanitatikaram.bsky.social · last wk.

Just trying to understand what sort of person writes a song supporting genocide committed by an all powerful nation militarily & politically & somehow pictures himself as the victim heroically standing up for the little guy 🥴? A Buddhist apparently 🙄..

#OtD 25 Jul 1934 Nestor Makhno, leader of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine during the Russian revolution of 1917 and co-author of the Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists, died in exile in Paris at the age of 44 shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/no-...

#OtD 26 Jul 1952 Eva "Evita" Peron, Argentinian actor and wife of president Peron, died. Commonly seen as a workers' hero, she and her husband admired Hitler and Mussolini, and provided refuge to numerous Nazi war criminals after WWII stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9831...

#OtD 26 Jul 1956 21,000 workers on strike against job cuts at 13 BMC factories in the UK were joined by 12,000 Briggs Motors workers in Dagenham who walked out. Fascists who turned up to urge a return to work had their van trashed. Video included here: www.youtube.com/watch

#OtD 26 Jul 1945 the UK Labour Party took office after a landslide victory. Often mythologised as great socialists, within days they used conscript troops against a dockers' go-slow, and continued brutal colonialism overseas. More info here: stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9829...